Photos of old Hulme by old Arden college associate; theinnervision. Some from the 1980s and many from the 90s when the crescents and blocks were being demolished.

My first independent visit to Hulme was a cinematic quest, as a teenaged visitor to the Aaben cinema to watch films I was officially too young to see. I went back a few times over the years for various social reasons and really enjoyed the way the area was sucking in all the people who had nowhere else to go, the refugees of the 70s and 80s who didn’t fit into the Conservative government’s vision of Britain, who had made Hulme their dominion in defiance, an expression of resistance to the war that was being waged against them.

I am not the person to tell the stories of Hulme, my moments there were fleeting but consistently so, it was a place I spent time in but never lived in. There are some great histories, the MDMA archive’s Moss Side Stories covers the Hulme scene in depth here and Exhulme tells it like it was here!